Cave art sheds new light on early mankind

Cave paintings as old as those found in Europe have been found in Indonesia, raising new questions about early mankind and the development of art in prehistoric times.

Animal drawings and hand stencils, the earliest of which has been radiocarbon-dated to almost 40,000 years ago, were discovered by a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists on the island of Sulawesi.

Currently the world’s oldest dated cave art is a red dot found in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, northern Spain, which was painted 40,800 years ago, not long after modern man arrived in Europe.